The vaccine/autism connection was a fraud
Not an error: a deliberate fraud.
Let that sink in a minute.
It’s not been an inconsequential fraud, either; I completely agree with the contention, voiced in the British medical journal BMJ, that Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s original study purporting to make the connection between autism and vaccinations “has done long-lasting damage to public health” (see this and this).
But it couldn’t have been done without a willing and for the most part scientifically ignorant public, clamoring for easy answers to medical mysteries. In an editorial in BMJ, editor Fiona Godlee writes that the furor against vaccines continues to be:
…fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession…
Andersen Cooper is helpfully giving Dr. Wakefield a forum in which to defend himself; the good doctor will be appearing on “Anderson Cooper 360” tonight. Wakefield will be saying that it’s his work that’s being distorted, by ruthless people determined “to crush any attempt to investigate valid vaccine safety concerns.”
Wakefield is accused of falsifying case histories in his study, whose findings have never been replicated since, either by himself or others. The lack of replication alone should have been enough to discredit it. But once the public thinks it has an explanation for something—and a “scientific” one at that—it is hard to change minds that have become set in stone.
[NOTE: Related case in point: remember Erin Brockovitch and PG&E? Well, it turns out Brockovitch was almost certainly wrong, and that the town of Hinckley has had no more cancer cases than would have been expected by chance.
Hey, but we saw the movie! How many people will get the corrected news?]
[ADDENDUM: More thoughts.]
Imagine that. Scientists making stuff up, manipulating data and distorting their findings for personal gain.
The horror! This guy must be employed either by Big Oil or Big Pharma. They’re the only scientists corrupted by money and notoriety. Follow the money trail. Can’t be the trial lawyers. Has to be Big Oil and Pharma.
The very real damage this guy did is the children who became ill (e.g. measles) because their parents refused childhood disease shots for fear of autism.
Michael Fumento has written extensively on Erin Brokovich. He isn’t nice to her. Go here.
http://www.fumento.com/weblog/archives/brockovich_erin/index.html
Mr. Frank: go here for my discussion of measles.
Neo’s initial link states that “Dr. Andrew Wakefield misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study”.
Please temporarily set aside, for maybe 10 seconds, Dr. Wakefield’s medical data, altered or sound. Now — pardon my naivete, but what the heck kind of study in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal bases its findings on only 12 patients??? Am I missing something here?
Well that narrows it down to contrails, extra terrestrials or capitalism as the likely culprit.
Wakefield’s study was on the MMR vaccine, so at best you can say, even if you accept that his study was a fraud, is that the MMR/autism connection is a fraud. Now here’s something else we should let sink in for a minute; 1 in 91 children are currently diagnosed with autism, 1 in 54 boys. As recently as 1990, that number was 3 in 10,000. Something’s causing the increase, if it’s not environmental, what is it? Nobody knows, except we absolutely positively know that it can’t be vaccines. No need to do a study comparing the rates of autism between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, because we know vaccines are safe and more is better.
BTW-When you talk about a “scientifically ignorant public, clamoring for easy answers to medical mysteries”, the people you’re talking about are the parents of these children. People who every year have to fight a cash-strapped school systems for services. People who’ve taken second and third mortgages out to pay for medical treatments, that largely aren’t covered by insurance. People who are terrifed about what will become of their 6 year old severely autistic son when he’s 26 or 36, and they’re too old to properly care for him. People who are getting tired of being told by really smart, scienifically brilliant scientists that there is no increase in autism, it’s just better diagnosis (as compared to the medical dark age of 1990?), or it’s all genetic, or it’s just greedy parents/school systems pushing diagnosis to get more money (been waiting almost 4 years for my check). Yes, some of these people are “scientifically ignorant”, but quite a few of them are very well educated, with strong backgrounds in various science disciplines. Broad generalzations like this really don’t help advance anyone’s case.
Illustrates perfectly how subversion works to facilitate confusion, economical outcome which can be used to push farther, create an army of useful idiots, and innocents clubs as fronts for even more.
multiply that out to include, AGW, Lysenkoism, Aids created in US military labs, peak oil, environmentalism (as stagnation), racial groups, rap, feminism, green groups, and on and on
[though you would never know it unless you know the history, otherwise you will make up some plausible excuse to fill in the gap of the story, as they taught you. this is why THEY don’t provide such an excuse, as the many different ones in peoples heads does better than anything they can make up and substantiate]
back in the 20s we were amazed to find out that there thousands of these organizations, positions, etc in the US, i give up trying to point out where to see it.
Here’s another one to add to the list: childhood cancer from overhead electric transmission lines; remember that one? All based on a small neighborhood study in Denver. When the sample size was increased to a much larger area the effect disappeared and showed it was just the usual random clustering that such data always shows. Not exactly fraudulent, but definitely in the cherry-picking catagory, but the damage was done despite the later retractions.
I remember my colleagues asking me about their houses. I tried to explain about the energy of a 60Hz photon, but that didn’t seem to ease their concerns 😉
http://www.mongabay.com/history/soviet_union/soviet_union-active_measures.html
Autism Reaches Epidemic Levels-Concerned Parents Believe Vaccines Are the Cause
http://www.thenhf.com/article.php?id=1747
you can dig more…
but he is not much different than Meade and Kinsey
or even Freud…
When Freud Came to America
chronicle.com/article/Freuds-Visit-to-Clark-U/48424/
One hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud arrived in the United States on his first and only visit. As the George Washington pulled into New York Harbor, he supposedly remarked to Carl Jung, who accompanied him, “They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague.”
Freud’s five lectures closed with a call to allow greater sexual freedom. He said civilization demands “excessive” sexual repression. “We ought not to aim so high that we completely neglect the original animality of our nature.” He cautioned that it was not possible to “sublimate” all sexual impulses into cultural accomplishments.
quite “progressive” of him…
theodore adorno -The Authoritarian Personality [which ignores that totalitarianism is way to the left, and established that conservatives were the real nazis, as we think today]
herbert marcuse [if it feels good do it!]
Wilhelm Reich
Alfred Kinsey (loved to shove a toothbrush up his johnson, and used rapists and pedophiles to establish childrens sexuality. meade helped to with her lies from samoa]
Franz Boas (who tagged meade)
John Dean “Conservatives Without Conscience”
Esalen, est, Feminist therapy, gender studies, queer studies, and critical theory emerged and were enthusiastically embraced.
Robin of berkley talks of it here:
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/01/psychology_and_the_shrinking_o_1.html
psychiatrist R.D. Laing labeled families, schools, and churches “the slaughterhouses of our children.”
Something’s causing the increase, if it’s not environmental, what is it? Nobody knows, except we absolutely positively know that it can’t be vaccines.
Assortative mating…
Since women and men now work, their jobs and then access to each other causes reinforcement of traits.
So, in silicon valley, where male programmers and geeks get to meet female geeks, they have a much higher rate of autism
Women are the reservoir pool of qualities in our society
By putting them to work, you not only get a low population, destruction of family, regression of intelligence, more diseases of genetic reinforcement, and more (not even going to mention secondary things like early onset of menses from father absence).
There is no real way to even talk about this as feminists and ideology has made such forbidden.
When women were NOT in the work force they did NOT mingle with men with the jobs sorting them out into self similar groups with qualities.
Today you have lawyers who have lawyers and docs with docs, and geeks with geeks, before the Cultural Revolution the combinations were more varied and did not have all these local minima having to do with IQ.
Back then, a man in an office doing some geeky thing could marry a woman who was not a geek or from a geek family and she liked him because he was empirically effective and complimented her. each made up for a lack in the other…
Now, people don’t have time, women work, and so we meet our mates in the office. Feminism has forbidden asymmetric relationships by power dialectics, so only equals or self similar can get together easier.
The boss can’t be with the secretary, but the geek programmer can be with the other geek programmer or physicist, etc.
Of course we no longer are allowed to understand this (which we actually used to know when most of us were farmers and hunters and had to raise animals, and rear children, now we raise children).
There is more, but I have already gone past my commentary limit for 2011…
This sort of thing probably goes back to, well, the introduction of the scientific method by the Greeks. Millikan’s famous oil drop experiment creatively removed observations that would have increased the amount of uncertainty. But that was mere shading – oh, and you should look at the link, but in particular the next section which quotes Richard Feynman about “a thing that scientists are ashamed of”.
[W]hat the heck kind of study in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal bases its findings on only 12 patients?
That’s a darn fine question. Statistically speaking, that’s a too small sample size. Usually the minimum is 30 for a normal distribution curve, but may vary depending on which distribution is the “right” one. Generally, this sort of thing requires a cohort study. They’re expensive and time consuming – decades, perhaps.
So they use a smaller sample size, which they can get a grant to do the smaller study. From that, they may be able to parlay the earlier work into a larger grant with a larger sample, and so on.
Something’s causing the increase, if it’s not environmental, what is it?
Maybe all that mercury we’re bringing into our homes in the form of fluorescent lighting?
I’d say the explosion of how many Americans take prescription drugs over the last 20 or 30 years would be a logical place to start looking.
No doubt, but scientifically ignorant nonetheless. Passion cannot substitute for reason. And as you’re apparently emotionally invested in this issue, it bears pointing out that a specious attribution of etiology impedes progress on both diagnostic and therapeutic fronts by wasting time and effort better spent on sound science. Less haste, more speed, and all that.
Power of suggestion, and not seeing something until you look for it.
You sit down for a picnic, and casually glancing to the one side, notice an ant. A few moments later, you happen to glance down to the other side and see a couple more ants…then you jump and realize they’re all over the place — you’ve sat on an anthill!
Also, guard against the fallacy of thinking that the cause must necessarily be among the hypotheses under consideration. It’s perfectly possible — indeed, not unlikely — that the syndrome arises from some cause as yet totally unknown to us (see, e.g., the prion story), or arises from a source as yet not considered seriously (e.g., gastric ulcers resulting from infection with the bacterium, H. pylorii — not stress, as was thought for years).
It’s tough to remain objective when one is personally involved (hence the old adage about lawyers representing themselves), but important to recognize that emotion clouds thought processes, and does not contribute to solving this type of problem.
LOL! I’ve done the same, and in similar fashion pointed out to magnet aficionados the electronic Zeeman energy of a paramagnet (forget diamagnets, much less the nuclear Zeeman energy!) in the field of a typical “therapeutic” magnet. No joy there, either.
The very first thing to do: ascertain whether the purported increase does in fact exist. Once convinced that there is a phenomenon at work, and not simply observational bias, begin compiling the taxonomy of the phenomenon, and from that compilation, generate conjectures and ultimately hypotheses (i.e., conjectures that suggest experiments that can falsify them). Taking random guesses is a waste of time.
Rob Smith: if you look at the previous posts of mine that I linked to, especially this one, which I recommend you read, you’ll find that I discuss the etiology of the increase in autism diagnoses.
What a lot of people don’t realize, is that when they forgo vaccinations because of a slight case of complications (some kids develop mental retardation after vaccines very rarely), they are effectively trading that for a very real and much bigger chance of illness and death due to the disease.
I have heard this also from the fluoride/chlorine in water debate – people swear that those “chemicals” are bad for you – they might slightly elevate your risk of cancer. But they are trading it for the very dangerous prospect of cholera and typhus, etc.
Haha, I have even heard people say “but fluoride is a by product of the aluminum refining process!!” dude, everything is a by product of something.
…people swear that those “chemicals” are bad for you – they might slightly elevate your risk of cancer.
So does oxygen.
Indeed.
Here is another thing which may subject me to thrown items: I think autism is overdiagnosed, much like ADHD. Maybe a lot of those people don’t even have the disease.
From what I have seen, if a boy has bad social skills, people are overly eager to diagnose him with “autism/aspergers/etc” (hey how come boys are overdiagnosed with ADHD too?)
I remember watching this TV expose supposedly about borderline autistic brothers – they just looked like 2 normal kids with low intelligence and bad social skills.
I guess you could look at it either way – either we all have something, or some of our diseases aren’t diseases.
Occam’s,
One thing most people don’t realize about science is how researchers can plod along for years investigating a phenomenon, and then suddenly a door is opened elsewhere that enables them to make rapid progress. The technology inspired by the human genome project has revolutionized thinking about epigenetics and the human microbiome, as well as other non-human fields of biology. There really isn’t the directed linear progress that many people expect. And, of course, there is also some hype on the part of scientists because they want funding and they need to simplify their message in order to get further support. As frustrating as it may be for the parents of an autistic child, we may just have to wait for some development in another area that will give scientists an insight into what is happening with these children. The people, especially celebrity advocates or lawyers, who throw out easy solutions (Christopher Reeves’ walking) don’t help people understand how science works. It probably causes them to forget what they did learn in school.
I noticed that Artfldgr linked to Robin of Berkeley’s latest article. I think it’s possibly the best thing she’s written. I meant to link it last night but forgot. So here it is again, in case anyone missed Art’s link:
Psychology and the Shrinking of America
So, in silicon valley, where male programmers and geeks get to meet female geeks, they have a much higher rate of autism
No doubt, but scientifically ignorant nonetheless.
Yes, all autism parents are scientifically ignorant computer geeks /eyeroll. I’m guessing neither of you have ever actually spent any kind of time with an autistic child or their parents. Which makes you perfect spokespersons for the vaccine industry. See, this is the real parallel between global climate change and autism. In both cases, to be considered an “expert”, the main qualification is agreeing with the “scientific consensus”. That’s how Paul Offett gets to be the vaccine/autism expert despite never having actually seen an autistic child in a clinical setting, and OBTW making millions of dollars as a vaccine industrialist.
Also, to my knowledge, there hasn’t been a study yet that can identify a genetic link to autism.
Neo, I read your article when you originally posted it. The problem with it with respect to autism is, the MIND Institute at UC-Davis did a study on autism rates in California that found that at most 30% of the increase can be explained by better diagnosis and category expansion, that still leaves a lot of unexplained increase.
Afaik the swindle concocted by an ‘activist’ who gets a cut of the liability proceeds is a post-WW2 phenomenon. If the inventor can be identified, his/her name should be immortalized as is Charles Ponzi’s.
While I don’t want to act like leftists who demand government action every time an imperfection in society comes to light, activist fraud seems a new kind of fraud. IMHO, if Wakefield and the like have been fraudulent or culpably negligent, they should be subject to disgorgement. I wonder if existing law is applicable and awaits the legal consensus to apply it.
However, I don’t want the researcher, analyst, commentator etc who is making a good-faith effort to be objective to be made vulnerable to punitive hindsight.
BTW-If autism rates aren’t increasing and the rate has always been something approaching 1 in 100, where are all the autistic adults?
Rob Smith: undiagnosed.
Rob Smith: oh, and if you have a link for that UC Davis study, I’d love to take a look. But I will say in advance that my best guess would be there’s no way they can really say what percentage of the change is due to diagnostic differences.
Have you read this? It’s old, of course (2004). But I’m pretty sure the UC Davis study you mentioned is the one critiqued in that article.
BTW-If autism rates aren’t increasing and the rate has always been something approaching 1 in 100, where are all the autistic adults?
Easy. Check university faculty in the physical sciences and engineering. /g (Physicsguy, do I lie?)
Seriously, though, boys/men have always been prone to single-minded (dare I say, obsessive?) pursuit of some topic, regardless of how arcane it may be. Few girls/women go in for memorizing batting averages, collecting every type of some obscure item, spotting trains, playing chess every waking hour (think Bobby Fischer), getting to level 73 in some computer game, or the like. And that kind of single-mindedness, coupled with its common correlate of poor social skills, nowadays makes you an odds-on favorite to be diagnosed with autism, whereas in an earlier, less overwrought time you’d just be called a geek.
Most of my classmates in both undergrad and grad school were geeks (not me, of course…), as were most of my colleagues in academia. Hard-core technical fields tend to attract these schizoid personality types, i.e., people who are interested in things and ideas, but not much in people.
Personal anecdote: as a young assistant prof I attended a get together of the faculty of my university with that of another prestigious one nearby. One guy stood alone in a corner, completely ignored by the chattering throng, so feeling a bit sorry for him I went over to introduce myself and chat a bit (see? Not a geek. Or am I trying too hard? /g).
When he told me his name, my jaw hit the floor. He was a Nobel Laureate, someone who had received his richly deserved Nobel Prize for a stupendous achievement, and yet he was being totally ignored. In my shock I blurted out something impolitic like, “You’re X?” But there he was standing in the corner, alone, ignored, apparently perfectly happy (indeed, probably happier left alone, which presumably why was his colleagues obliged him). Geek. Gotta love him.
And as for those who would diagnose such people as evidencing some pathology, I say, “It takes all kinds to fill the freeway.”
Assortative mating??!!
We geeks have always been able to find each other.
I believe the WHO expanded the definition of AIDS and, presto, the number of AIDS cases in Africa doubled.
So it can be done.
And there’s the problem of the amateur diagnostician. A teacher, say, gets two hours on what to look for. Not nearly enough, and not time for many caveats.
A geeky kid, kid with poor social skills, diagnosed by the eager do-gooder sends the kid to the school nurse, thence, possibly, to the doctor. He gets a diagnosis of Aspergers or autism because the mild end of those are indistinguishable from just having certain kinds of non-standard personalities.
One thing most people don’t realize about science is how researchers can plod along for years investigating a phenomenon, and then suddenly a door is opened elsewhere that enables them to make rapid progress.
Expat, one shock I had in moving to industry was the gross failure of business types to understand this.
On learning that a particular research problem was proving intractable, a business guy replied, “Put more chemists on it.”
As if scientists were carpenters at a building site, wherein progress was a linear function of manpower…
This nitwit failed to grasp that the rate-limiting step in progress on this problem wasn’t the number of strong backs, or nimble hands, but the incidence of ideas. Definitely terra incognita in his case.
Ours is indeed a fallen race in a fallen world.
If your Mom forgets to take the Marlboro cigarette out of her mouth when she tells the state trooper to kiss her ass, you might be autistic.
Rob Smith: undiagnosed.
Easy. Check university faculty in the physical sciences and engineering.
I’m guessing you’ve never really had any experience with autism. Geeky =/= autistic. No offense, but you’re just talking out of your hind quarters here.
Seriously, though, boys/men have always been prone to single-minded (dare I say, obsessive?) pursuit of some topic, regardless of how arcane it may be.
Seriously…just stop…you have no idea what you’re talking about. The breadth of your ignorance about autism is beyond description.
Regarding the UC-Davis study I cited, it’s in the Jan 2009 issue of Epidemiology, sadly behind a pay wall. Here’s a link to a UC-Davis article that describes the study and it’s findings link
Sorry, linked to the Epidemiology magazine, not the UC-Davis article. Here’s the correct link
Rob Smith: I believe the people making those comments are referring to Asperger’s and pervasive developmental disorders, part of the autism spectrum.
Rob Smith said,”Something’s causing the increase, if it’s not environmental, what is it? Nobody knows, except we absolutely positively know that it can’t be vaccines.”
I have a niece who has an autistic son. She is a person who is obsessed with not getting fat. (Rail slim she is.) But she also was obsessed that her son not get fat. His diet was definitely deficient in protein and fat when he was in his formative years. He’s 18 now and working at an entry level job. He’s also learning to live on his own, which may be a ten year project. So, I’ve seen the heart break and distress. It is not an easy road.
My question is, could it be the change in diet? The conventional wisdom today is that most fats are taboo and that means less protein too. I am no expert and my niece’s child feeding pattern might just be a coincidence. When a child is growing rapidly, especially their brains, some could need more fat. Yes, real fat like comes in whole milk, butter, hamburger, etc. It just seems to me it might bear some looking into. Has anyone in the medical community thought about this?
Neo…
Please correct yourself.
P&G = Proctor & Gamble
PG&E = Pacific Gas & Electric
Erin went after PG&E for using what lab chemists call ‘cleaning solution.’
That is, sulfuric acid (typ. reagent grade — common as water in a chem lab — + chromium oxide ( as crystals ). It will rip the skin off your bones… but it does leave hyper-clean Pyrex.
NOT something you want in your ground water.
It might well be that the ACID liberated metal toxins in the soil on the way to the well.
That PG&E ‘lost’ astounding amounts of ‘cleaning solution’ without concern.
The nearby rock once stood upon the ocean floor. Elsewhere, in California, it has been discovered that such strata is laden with Selenium. ( Se )
It is now FULLY established that Se is a nerve toxin of the first order.
For those not so chemically minded O(8), S(16), Se(34) are stacked in the Periodic Table. Hence both Sulfur AND Selenium compounds are typically extremely toxic — even in absurdly low concentrations.
Hydrogen Sulfide is an analog to water… but is a gas much more deadly than hydrogen cyanide!
In fact, sulfur compounds are SO deadly, all animal life is repulsed by them. Trivial amounts are commonly used to add stink to commercially delivered natural gas.
As for Selenium, treat it like NiCad batteries: total respect.
In an earlier age selenium rectifiers were the first solid state method of getting AC over to DC. When they smoked — did they EVER stink.
It’s our body’s way of saying stay away from this toxin.
———
Any entity that permits astonishing amounts of acid/ cleaning solution into dry porous aquifers gets no sympathy with me.
And what will happen to the scientists?
… Oh, nothing.
.
.
We should
1) Try them for Crimes Against Humanity, and
2) if convicted, draw & quarter them. This really is an instance where someone’s head should be on a spike as a warning to the next 3 generations.
For propaganda purposes vaccines were declared “safe”. But this claim is demonstrably false, as all specialists know, but hate to accept in public, to avoid mass panic and abstaining from vaccination. This is one of “noble lies” perpetuating by medical community for higher goal of keep us all vaccinated. And the falsehood of this specific study does not in any way disprooves existence of some link between vaccination and autism.
Rob Smith: I believe the people making those comments are referring to Asperger’s and pervasive developmental disorders, part of the autism spectrum.
From the article I cited referring to the UC-Davis MIND Institute study:
“The methodology eliminated migration as a potential cause of the increase in the number of autism cases. It also revealed that no more than 56 percent of the estimated 600-to-700 percent increase, that is, less than one-tenth of the increased number of reported autism cases, could be attributed to the inclusion of milder cases of autism. Only 24 percent of the increase could be attributed to earlier age at diagnosis.”
The authors of the study also state:
“Hertz-Picciotto said that the study is a clarion call to researchers and policy makers who have focused attention and money on understanding the genetic components of autism. She said that the rise in cases of autism in California cannot be attributed to the state’s increasingly diverse population because the disorder affects ethnic groups at fairly similar rates.”
JJ…I don’t claim to know what causes autism, and certainly not in specific cases, but autism is a “brain injury” that likely has genetic and environmental components. In your grand nephew’s case, I guess it is plausible that the dietary deficiency could have made him more susceptible to environmental damage, but iir from my college classes in human physiology, the brain is pretty good at making sure it gets first crack at having it’s nutritional needs met first.
Sergey, an excellent point. This quote from C.S. Lewis seems appropriate:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
As a scientific editor of Russian edition of the main official document on which all vaccination policy is founded, Anderson@May manual “Infectional diseases of humans: Prevention and control”, I am fully aware about difficult ethical and medical problems involved with vaccination. Risk and benefit analisis for any specific policy is not a simple matter, it requires knowledge of statistics for given disease, its mortality, contagiousness, efficiency of given vaccine preparation, schedule of vaccination, possible complications and their frequencies and so on. There still are many known unknowns and, possibly, unknown unknowns. We need serious professional discussion on this topic and more studies. But this is hardly possible in poisonous moral climate, defined by denial of risks by medical establishment, on one hand, and public hysteria, on the other hand. And we need better vaccines, with no live virus, ballast proteins and polysacharides, capable to induce allergic reaction against brain tissues, with no mercury-contained preservatives. All this is possible with genetic-engineered technology (recombinant DNA techniques), but the problem must be first recognized and adequately treated.
Wakefield’s “study” was suspicious from the get-go. I will dead long before any of the MSM anchors goes on the air and apologizes for giving this charlatan and his celebrity minions (Jenny McCarthy et al) a forum to spew their lies. Due diligence in journalism ought involve researching a little rather than spreading sensational rumors.
I second the motion by Ray regarding Michael Fumento on Erin Brockovich. My wife thinks it’s funny when I have a meltdown any time her name or the movie is mentioned on TV.
Ditto the bogus association between power lines and childhood cancer as published in the New Yorker, same folks who brought you Rachel Carson’s non-scientific polemic, Silent Spring.
And we need better vaccines, with no live virus, ballast proteins and polysacharides, capable to induce allergic reaction against brain tissues, with no mercury-contained preservatives.
For all the talk about “anti-vaxxers” like Jenny McCarthy, Doug Flutie, Dr. Bob Sears, etc. if you read what they say about vaccines, this is exactly what they’re calling for. Neither they, nor I are anti-vaccine, but I want safe vaccines and I want an honest assessment of the necessity of all the vaccines we give kids. For example, do all babies need a Hep-B vaccination before they leave the hospital? Unless the mother has Hep-B, there’s just no medical reason to vaccinate an infant against against it.
Wakefield’s “study” was suspicious from the get-go.
What was suspicious about it? All the study did was study GI issues in kids with autism. The study also called for more study about a possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism, but it didn’t claim to establish a link. BTW-a recent study by Dr. Krigsman (full disclosure, Krigsman worked with Wakefield at Thoughtful House) did replicate Wakefield’s findings link
This story should give insight into how vaccines seem to get irrationally targeted by less than honest players in medical research. But it wont. Because at the same time it further undermines people’s trust of the medical authorities in general which lies behind vaccines being suspect of calamities in the first place.
I spent some time on youtube looking at examples of autistic kids. The variation of behavior and symptoms seems so broad that i’m afraid we’re watching the unfolding of a major disservice to the real developmentally impaired. If we’re not careful, we could concievably see the label of autism include every child of below average developmental skills.
When you look at the “anti-vaccine” position on vaccines, what you see is that rather than being against vaccines, what they want is for vaccines to be made safer and for the vaccine schedule to be evaluated, not for ensuring compliance, but for safety. To my knowledge, there have been no studies on the safety of administering up to 7 different vaccines in one sitting. According to the CDC schedule, at 2 months and 4 months, a baby is vaccinated against Rotoviris, Diptheria, Tetanus, & Pertussis (DTap), Haemophilus influenzae (Hib), and Polio. Is this safe? Nobody knows because no studies have been done. When I look at the “pro-vaccine” side (or as I like to call them, “the Chicago school”, vaccinate early and often), I’m reminded of the Monty Python song from “The Meaning of Life”, “Every Sperm is Sacred”. I can imagine Paul Offet and Julie Gerberding (former head of the CDC, now head of Merck’s vaccine division) singing:
“Every vaccine is wanted.
Every vaccine is good.
Every vaccine is needed
In your neighbourhood.”
Autisim is overdiagnosed becuase it suits everybody. Nobody wants to be told that their kid is retarded because they mated with an old man or a woman who was too old to breed well. Nobody wants to be told that all that coke they did in the 90s has caught up with them. Nodbody wants to be told that their kid is siimply, hopelessly retarded. And nobody wants to be told that they have so many problems themselves that they never should’ve had a child at all.
The assertion was that chromate (a tetrahedral oxoanion structurally similar to sulfate and phosphate, and therefore potentially able to enter cells through biological transport mechanisms) was the proximate toxin, and that it acted by undergoing intracellular reduction to Cr(III), which binds to nitrogen heterocycles such as the purines and pyrimidines of DNA. To my knowledge, no one was talking about other metals, but if they were, then studies of chromate concentrations in water become moot.
Selenium is an essential trace element that appears in a number of enzymes. When speaking about an element, be careful to define which form of the element (i.e., chemical compound containing the element) we’re talking about. Selenium dioxide — toxic. Selenocysteine — essential for life.
The first sentence is true. The second is nonsense. Sulfur and even (as pointed out above) selenium are essential to life. The statements is true of certain compounds, but no generalization can be made. Btw, the statement is also true of oxygen compounds — ozone is extremely toxic, and aerobic organisms have evolved enzymes to protect them from the toxicity of hydrogen peroxide (peroxidases) and superoxide anions (superoxide dismutases).
You’re speaking of mercaptans, such as methyl mercaptan (methanethiol). Be aware that cysteine, an essential amino acid, is also a thiol.
Moral: Guard against painting complex issues with much too broad a brush.
Certainly I was, neo. This is one source of my disquiet: the spectrum of symptoms associated with the syndrome. This, in conjunction with the nebulous nature of some symptoms (e.g., social awkwardness), makes me wonder if it’s a catch-all for what may be any number of phenomena.
Bullseye.
So, is your primary concern autism, or vaccines? At this point, you realize that there’s apparently no nexus between the two. Consider the possibility that vaccines have nothing whatever to do with autism. It’s natural to want to attribute the cause to something, and frustrating (and frightening) to admit that something is currently beyond our ability to understand, much less treat or control, but sometimes that’s the case.
One last point. Not to be personal, but would we be correct in assuming that your interest in autism is more than academic? If so, frankly, I think that that warrants mention, because a personal connection can color one’s views.
rickl,
thanks
I should point out that the more history robin reads, the more she sounds like me. the converted who don’t read the history, don’t start pointing to the fact that most of the threads lead back tot he same people over and over and over and over and over…
that the overwhelming connections and easy to confirm simple facts point to one thing if you know the history, and only those that dont know it or are in complete denial of it, cant point to each brick put in place to make what we have today.
the dream that is america is now a nightmare, and we are not allowed to reestablish the frame of mind that created it (gleickshaltung)…
america is a state of mind, not a place, and her mind is now schizo…
Autisim is overdiagnosed becuase it suits everybody. Nobody wants to be told that their kid is retarded
Because being told your child is autistic is so much better than being told he’s retarded? Really?
And nobody wants to be told that they have so many problems themselves that they never should’ve had a child at all.
You know, I would never wish autism on someone else’s child, but boy, you tempt me. You sorely tempt me.
So, is your primary concern autism, or vaccines? At this point, you realize that there’s apparently no nexus between the two.
Based on what, that one study on one vaccine may have been disproved?
Consider the possibility that vaccines have nothing whatever to do with autism.
I’d love for vaccines to be perfectly safe and have nothing to do with autism. It would be real easy to prove, a large scale study comparing autism rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated children would do the trick, but I don’t see that happening any time soon largely because there’s no upside for the people who could fund such a study and an awful lot of potential downside.
Not to be personal, but would we be correct in assuming that your interest in autism is more than academic?
Let’s say for the moment that I do have “skin in the game”, what of it? Doesn’t vaccine industrialist Paul Offett have a personal interest? He stands to make a lot of money of his Rotoviris vaccine (he’s already made by some estimates 10s of millions). I’d say Jenny McCarthy, et.al. are hurting his business. What about the board at Merck, Glaxo, or the rest of the big drug companies? They’re the guys who fund most medical studies. Is it in their interest to find a connection between vaccines and autism? I would argue they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders not to. What about the parents of neuro-typical kids who are inundated with stories about how crazy autism parents are preventing “herd immunity” and putting their kids at risk? Are they dispassionate? I don’t think anybody’s views are uncolored on this topic.
Rob Smith: I think it was clear that my quote referred to people on this comments board and their definitions of autism, not the one in the study.
While I don’t want to act like leftists who demand government action every time an imperfection in society comes to light, activist fraud seems a new kind of fraud
again… READ about Willi Mé¼nzenberg
I am starting to get the distinct impression that the search for whats going on is not real, as very few want to do anything other than make up stuff.
activist fraud seems new to those born yesterday who have not read the history, or know their history.
after all, new to you is not new to someone that knows!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
you have to realize that since this is what they do to our memory, they dont care if they are caught TODAY doing something because tomorrow, it never happened!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
now here is the kicker – ALL ACTIVISTS ARE BEING USED AS THEY ARE THE ARMY OF SOMEONE ELSE WHO MOTIVATES THEM WITH WORDS NOT EMPIRICAL FACTS (otherwise they aren’t activists)
you can look at the lists of known organization i put in the other post… notice the liberal use of peoples, league, and on and on… a kind of familiar thing to let people in the know, know what to support without being told, and others to accept denial.
Franz boas pushed cultural relativism…
once the AAA finally turned, they did this
Adopted by a vote of the AAA membership June 15, 2005.
Although Boas felt that scientists have a responsibility to speak out on social and political problems, he was appalled that they might involve themselves in disingenuous and deceitful ways. Thus, in 1919, when he discovered that four anthropologists, in the course of their research in other countries, were serving as spies for the American government, he wrote an angry letter to The Nation. (which is the AAA referral above)
however, methinks the man protested too much as he was spying, or rather, working as a innocent to help stalin, and communism.
take some time and tease out the names below and take a look at what they did and worked on and how they molded our nation
Care to see how they turned out and what they did and whats known NOW that the histories in schools dont refleft?
(I thought feminists said women weren’t allowed to go to college:
Could it be that Barnard, and Radcliffe are womens colleges? And feminists focus on mens schools like Harvard (forgetting Radcliffe))
Fay-Cooper Cole (1914)
Elsie Clews Parsons – who received her doctorate in sociology from Columbia in 1899
Leslie Spier (1920)
Ruth Bunzel (1929)
Ruth Benedict (1923)
Margaret Mead (1929)
Margaret Mead has been discredited… she was an activist researcher..
What year did she get her degree? so did activists poison research before today?
[Who funded the Tuskegee syphilis study? Not the state, but a wealthy progressive]
[note that his religious affiliation is not meaningful — had to remove that!]
1915
“Cultural anthropologist” Franz Boas, and his many followers, control
the American Anthropological Association, which pushes the idea that there
is no such thing as race or, therefore, psychological differences among the
human races, especially regarding intelligence/cognitive ability. Boas’
ideas are championed worldwide, with horrifying results.
And
Oh… so Meade, Kinsey, and Boas is part of the larger group of people with a political agenda to PROVE ideology… (and thereby raise their favored person to a Prophet)
Still think that activism in sciences sullying the waters and making them toxic is new?
In 1995 the VENONA decrypts became known
see any names you recognize
see any names you recognize
did upton sinclair influence anyone?
how about the fabians?
see any names you like or know?
‘Scaremongering’ Lancet accused of causing harm to health and wasting millions
Nobel prizewinners in the Royal Society attack on editor over publication of flawed research
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article534577.ece
by the way, one of the earliest historical things as to a person with an ideological agenda turning the screws was the dominican priest who threatened the churches money from universities it created to teach, if the church didnt go after Galileo
The main culprit in all this is the Daily Mail newspaper and its idiotic crusade against the MMR vaccine. They singlehandedly elevated the spurious findings of one researcher and spread panic throughout their scientifically illiterate readership. Both my parents maintain the MMR is a dangerous no matter what further evidence comes to light, and my sister had neither of her kids vaccinated because if it. It makes me furious every time I think about it.
The Geek Syndrome
Autism – and its milder cousin Asperger’s syndrome – is surging among the children of Silicon Valley. Are math-and-tech genes to blame?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html
I have autism spectrum abilities, but as far as i know, am not autistic or aspergers in the clinical way. even though, i still have problems with people
i am starting to realize that in some people high ability and passion, and talent induced a kind of schizo paranoia in them…
they are afraid and for no reason
[media making it seem like every person without a huge social life that is evident is going to go postal or just waiting to show their dark side]
my ability to think and abstract and all that is augmented by my ability to remember like rain man (though not as good, but much broader interests), fly through mathematical landscapes in my mind, and all kinds of stuff that took me years to figure out others cant do (and would bury you if they got the chance).
lulu
THE ASSORTATIVE MATING THEORY A Talk with Simon Baron-Cohen
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/baron-cohen05/baron-cohen05_index.html
New Theories of Autism: Hyper-Systemizing and Assortative Mating: The Assortative Mating of High Systemizers
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/518354_3
nice thing about having qualities but not the whole is that i get the benefit with a lot less negative payment to have it.
my problem is that average smarts peopel who were raised on self esteem have it out for such like me, or occams nobel prize winner. we are MUCH better off being quiet.
since they took my money and i ahve no degree to use, i am outside looking in at the party i cant participate in.
dont think i dont, but i am not allowed or authorized. so i am punished for trying. meanwhile, a top geneticist is flabbergasted at my simulations that rework and make a cogent model to replace the blueprint model of life.
right now, my boss has supressed my ability to help, and has and is going to fire me for work i do at home for friend researchers. without my projects to spend my time on, and not having a large social life, i am stuck in an even worse prison than normally.
sadly, the phd researchers are all upset that this is going on and dont understand that everyone is not authorized to think and be heard (thanks to their political sentiments being realized but not knowing that that is what it is).
its also why i am so verbose!!!!!!!!!!!
and why i can quote huge history down to the tiny grains and show the systemic synoptic structure.
so now i am not eating. too upset.. its been three or four days now. once they kicked me out for not being the right sex or color, i have never had any control or ability to guide my own life. 🙁
and outside i only meet two kinds, those that want to help and do something, but no will to actually move and do. and those that do, but do so to steal and leave me dry.
so far the third kind who would team and do, and not steal and create an ongoing relationship that was mutually productive, is a myth.
after 47 years i have little hope…
Autism – and its milder cousin Asperger’s syndrome – is surging among the children of Silicon Valley. Are math-and-tech genes to blame?
The problem is, autism is surging everywhere, not just Silicon Valley (or Redmond). Another problem is that nobody has been able to identify these “math-and-tech genes” that supposedly cause autism.
To cite a different type of problem looking for a cause, I can tell a story about “Agent Orange.”
In the early 1950s I worked doing White Pine Blister Rust control during my summer vacations from college. Blister Rust is an intermediate host disease and the intermediate host is the wild gooseberry bush. To stop the spread of Blister Rust you had to eliminate the gooseberry bushes. We used 24D or 245T, both defoliants. Our method was to carry back pack sprayers with a mixture of the chemical diluted with water, which was sprayed on the bushes and their roots. A typical day consisted of spraying four or five back pack loads. The sprayers were loaded by mixing the concentrated chemical with water. Our employer, the National Park Service, said the chemicals were safe to work with even when the skin was exposed to the concentrate. Just flush it off with water and all will be well. We didn’t wear any protective clothing and most days our clothes were soaked with the spray by quitting time.
Flash forward a few years to 1968 when the U.S. began using Agent Orange (245T) to defoliate the jungle in Vietnam. Then remember the number of Vietnam veterans who were claiming their health was damaged by the chemicals. I was alarmed by the claims knowing that I had been highly exposed to the chemicals back in the 50s. I went to a Navy doctor who gave me a thorough going over and could find nothing amiss, though he said it might take many years before I would have any symptoms. Well, here I am 40 years later and I have not had any health problems that could be attributed to my close contact with “Agent Orange” over four summers. I am also in contact with two people who worked with me those summers and they have had no problems either. The question is, were there really a lot of health problems caused by Agent Orange usage in Vietnam? If so, why have I and my two friends never experienced any problems? Did my friends and I have special immunity to the effects? If so, why? These are the kinds of questions that have no answers, unless big definitive studies can be run to pin point cause and effect. But they won’t be because of the cost and the fact that no definitive result might be forthcoming.
The autism, vaccine connection is much like that. More evidence is needed but not likely to be provided because it costs big money and there isn’t a lot of money to be made from it. So, the argument over the connection will rage on.
Wrt Aftfldgr’s 2:12 pm & 2:24 pm responses to me :
Yesterday I wrote, without italics:
Artfldgr extracted only the sentence I have italicized.
Enough said.
There are some quick changes in human population that can not be explained by neither environmental nor genetical causes. One of them was (is) acceleration, which brought about shift of the time of onset of pubertat by 1-2 years to younger adolescents, with corresponding increase of human height by several inches. Still nobody knows why: this belongs to domain of science which is in its infancy, developmental biology, most of mechanism of which are unknown. Autism epidemic can belong to the same category. Who knows?
ence both Sulfur AND Selenium compounds are typically extremely toxic – even in absurdly low concentrations.
then don’t eat your egg yellows…
“If a boiled egg is overcooked, a greenish ring sometimes appears around egg yolk. This is a manifestation of the iron and sulfur compounds in the egg.”
Artfldgr extracted only the sentence I have italicized.
Enough said.
you forgot to mention i bolded the sentence i was commenting on as a general comment towards the idea.
i see NOTHING after it that would tell a younger person who didnt know the history.
care to pick other nits?
and can you explain to me why you had to recopy your whole post to show that i didnt copy your whole post?
i thought i was too long, and had to shorten things. if i have to copy whole posts to comment on a sentence, then the posts i write will get LONGER as the other persons stuff is repeated over and over.
sigh..
nit pickers picking nits..
Because it makes you emotional about an issue that requires clarity of thought.
Pharma companies don’t make much money on vaccines, and in general view them as a white elephant. Vaccines are expensive to make and distribute, and invite litigation arising from idiosyncratic reactions (most commonly, anaphylaxis). Some years ago the government began taking steps to encourage companies to manufacture vaccines (e.g., flu vaccines) because so many were abandoning the field. See Vaccine Supply: A Cross-National Perspective
Vaccines are a lousy business, and are perceived as such in the industry. Did you ever see a vaccine startup company? Nope. Now you know why.
You’re thinking of clinical trials of prospective drugs, which on a dollar basis comprise most of the medical studies because clinical trials are generally so expensive (commonly involving thousands of patients at multiple sites with multiple investigators over multiple years). Basic science, such as that directed to the origins of disease, is largely funded by the NIH.
Herd immunity isn’t a matter of anecdote; it follows from the mathematics of disease propagation. Transmission of an infective disease requires proximity between two individuals who are both susceptible to it and one of whom has it, that proximity to occur within the infective period of the disease. For measles, say, that period is maybe two weeks. If a disease carrier doesn’t encounter a susceptible person within that time, that incidence of the disease dies out. That’s herd immunity.
Put it another way: why don’t we ever hear of a serial murderer happening by chance to kill another serial murderer? Because there are so few of them, their meeting by chance is unlikely to occur before one of them is captured or killed.
My take: the vaccine-autism hypothesis is a classic example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. When something happens, people tend to look retrospectively for some unusual incident — so far, so good — but all too often, without further reflection, assign one as the cause.
But the fact is that the cause may in fact arise from the unusual event, or from a commonplace event that they’ve overlooked, or possibly have nothing to do with either. A classic example of this was a recent headline that the Hiroshima A-bomb had just claimed another victim. Yessir, great weapon. Just drop it and wait 65 years.
Having said that, maybe silicone implants cause autism. No one tell Jenny McCarthy.
What acceleration in the onset of puberty and increase in height?
I’ve read that the lower and middle classes in Europe equalled the height of the uppers only in the Fifties.
A recent documentary from England was about a graveyard whose inhabitants were larger than the general populace about 1000 AD. The question was whether they were monks or aristos. Either came from the more well-off. Better pre and post natal nutrition meant they were bigger–and smarter–than the peasants.
The question was solved by seeing if there were evidence of wounds on the skeletons, monks being notably pacifistic and aristos being fighting men.
Onset of puberty in women seems to be connected to diet. The better, the earlier.
Artfldgr @January 7th, 2011 at 4:28 pm:
I copied part of my comment–not the “whole post”–to point out the context of the sentence you extracted.
Afaic that context is self-explanatory, doubly so when considered together with Neo’s post. Apparently you did not see it as I do. Before producing your twelve-screen reply, you did not ask me for clarification.
I’m done with this.
Destroying the Credibility of Science
http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2011/01/destroying-credibility-of-science.html
Because it makes you emotional about an issue that requires clarity of thought.
Yawn….you’ve posted as much on this topic as I have. It’s would be just as easy for me to question your partiality. I generally don’t spend a lot of time discussing issues I don’t care about.
Pharma companies don’t make much money on vaccines,
I believe vaccines are a $25B a year business.
Vaccines are expensive to make and distribute, and invite litigation arising from idiosyncratic reactions
Actually, vaccines are pretty much risk free…any litigation goes to a special court and the awards are paid by a tax on vaccines…IOW the consumer pays any damage awards.
You’re thinking of clinical trials of prospective drugs
No, I’m not.
Herd immunity isn’t a matter of anecdote; it follows from the mathematics of disease propagation.
It’s hard to look at all this jargon and conclude that you’re a dispassionate observer.
My take: the vaccine-autism hypothesis is a classic example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Or it could be that 10s of thousands of parents actually have a bit more insight into their kids than you do….no that couldn’t be it……
Rob Smith:
There’s a difference between being interested in a topic because it’s interesting to you in the intellectual sense, and being interested in it because of something in your personal life. That said, people can be unbiased even if they have a personal or emotional interest in something, and they can be biased even lacking that personal interest.
However, all else being equal, it seems logical to think that, in general (not in particular), it is more likely for those with a personal interest to have a bias. This of course is not particularly relevant to whether any particular person has a bias or not.
As far as profits from vaccinations go, please read this.
You say that litigation is pretty much risk-free, because cases go to a special court and rewards are paid through taxes. But you leave out why this arrangement came to be. Originally that was not the case. Originally, the national vaccination program was becoming unworkable and companies were dropping out of the business because of the enormous cost of litigation and paying damages. That’s when the government stepped in to set up the system, because it wanted to keep companies from pulling out of the vaccination business altogether. The special court and rewards system was the result of a compromise designed to allow vaccinations to continue to be made without bankrupting the companies involved (fewer and fewer of them have wanted to become involved, I might add) while at the same time protecting people’s right to sue over claims of damages from vaccinations:
Like most compromises, it probably satisfies no one, but it’s an attempt to serve both sides somewhat.
As for your last point, that parents have more insight into their kids than others, I would not argue with that assertion. What I would argue with is whether “insight” is the point. Scientific cause and effect can never be determined by anecdote, no matter how poignant or insightful.
Frankly, intrinsically I couldn’t care less about this issue per se. To be brutally honest, my zeroth-order conjecture is…well, I started to type this, but you don’t want to know. Suffice it to say it’s the simplest explanation for the observations.
Revenues, sure. What are the margins? I’ve run discovery research in pharma; I wouldn’t have had the temerity to suggest getting into vaccines, for fear my colleagues would think I’d lost my mind.
Yes, you are, whether or not you know it. Pharma rarely supports basic research; if there’s no intellectual property in prospect — i.e., something that potentially can be monetized – they’re not generally interested, and only the most intrepid of pharma employees would propose letting such a research contract. Trust me on this: I’ve been both the recipient and the provider of such support.
Jargon? The probability of two people with a given attribute encountering each other is X^2, where X is the prevalence of the attribute. If X = 0.10, the probability is 10E-2 (1%). If X = 10E-3, the probability is 10E-6 (0.0001%). If X = 10E-4, the probability is 10E-8 (0.000001%). Math is not just for scientists.
It’s not insight into the kids that’s at issue, but insight into the pathology, into which the parents likely have no worthwhile insight, being untrained, having too small a sample size, and being too close to be objective. Allowing parents’ emotions and uninformed opinions to dictate research directions risks wasting time and resources on unproductive directions.
This last is the point: what you probably take as my obscurantism is motivated by a desire not to waste time on unsubstantiated conjectures that lead to dead ends, and ultimately delay resolution of the problem.
Neo, I don’t think it is really some great revelation that new vaccines are extremely profitable while older ones aren’t. Does it really surprise you that Gardisil (the example cited in your article) is more profitable than, say, the polio vaccine?
You say that litigation is pretty much risk-free, because cases go to a special court and rewards are paid through taxes. But you leave out why this arrangement came to be.
Why it came to be doesn’t change the point (that you seem to concede) that vaccines are pretty much risk free for pharmaceutical companies, and, as your source states, they can be very profitable.
Scientific cause and effect can never be determined by anecdote,
I’m really not sure what the point of this statement is….I readily concede that I disagree with the well funded, industry/government supported consensus on vaccines and autism, just like I disagree with the well funded, industry/government supported consensus on global climate change. I’d be willing to change my mind if only this well funded, industry/government consensus would shift some of the resources looking into phantom genetic causes for autism into a study comparing autism rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, what would it take for you to change your’s.
There was an anthrax scare after 9/11.
Iirc the government–I forget if it was a Congressional committee or the Executive branch–threatened to seize the predominant manufacturer’s patent unless the vendor agreed to the price that the government wanted to pay.
Presumably a pharma CEO takes that incident into account while weighing whether to fund a vaccine.
Actually vaccine safety is discussed in length in manual I cited, Anderson&May “Infection diseases in humans: Dynamics and control”. Here purely scientific approach is used, with equations and statistics and risk assessments. It has nothing to do with industry-political “consensus”, only pure math and observational statistics. And I can assert that recomendations of this manual are in glaring contradiction with “consensus” policy accepted in USA. For example, rubella vaccination is recommended in A&M only for girls at 12-13 years, no rubella vaccination is recommended for boys. (MMR vaccine is now applied for all infants as early as days after birth; “R” here stands for rubella.) In 1970-s I worked as researcher in Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Immunology, the leading Russian center of vaccines development and certification. All information about vaccination complications was collected there, and there were several epidemic outbursts caused by vaccination, as a rule, with neurologic damage. Vaccines now, like in days of Pasteur, are prepared on rodents brain tissue or on chicken embryos. They contain attenuated (weakened) live virus, brain tissue proteins, phospholipides and polysacharides potentially capable to provoke autoimmune response against neural system of vaccinated kids. That is why I do not believe in “consensus” opinion that vaccination risk is always lower than risk associated with epidemic outbursts: this all depends, and in the manual I cited it is shown why.
Math is not just for scientists.
i like that…
and physics isnt just for us physicists..
🙂
into which the parents likely have no worthwhile insight, being untrained, having too small a sample size, and being too close to be objective
I wish to note that Occam did NOT say NO CHANCE, and that the chances hinge on how much they invest and their abilities.
It actually shows how honest he is in his assessments and points, given that it would be easier to say that small statistical chances are equal to 0, he forgoes that to be honest.
what i find nice is that when he is talking as opposed to the left, or the other passionate mind wrestlers (their idea of debate through hyperbolic points), is conditional to some degree within a framework that he is expressing is not fixed and so a lot depends on the actualities.
sorry… too much coffee this morning
The honest have constraints that others do not accept
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Your ideas about autism are no longr correct.
Mercury and autism: Accelerating Evidence?
Joachim Mutter*, Johannes Naumann*, Rainer Schneider*1, Harald Walach*1,2
& Boyd Haley3
Especially, in the U.S., the prevalence of autism became
endemic with an increase of about 5 in 10,000 to 60
in 10,000 after three additional thimerosal-containing
vaccines were introduced for newborns in the early
1990s, whereas in most other countries with a much
lower autism prevalence, like Germany or Denmark,
thimerosal in vaccines was reduced at the same time. In
California, the autism rate increased by 634% between
1987 and 2002, which cannot be attributed to shifts in
the interpretation of diagnostic criteria, migration or
improved diagnostic accuracies [3,4,9]. Other developmental
and behavioural disorders like attention deficit
disorders (ADD) or attention deficit hyperactivity
disorders (ADHD) have also increased up to 1 out of
every 6 children in the U.S. [10,11]. It should be noted
that in the 1990s, newborns until age of 6 months were
regularly exposed to a cumulative thimerosal dose of
187,5 µg [12].
Against this background it
is interesting to note that several scientists from the
FDA, NIH, and CDC may have been influenced by
vaccine manufacturers or dental boards [15, 20—24].
Despite this information, the Institute of Medicine of
the U.S. concluded recently that there is no relationship
between thimerosal and autism, and that no further
studies should be conducted to evaluate the relationship
between thimerosal and autism [25]. This was done in
spite of several biological studies reporting thimerosal
to have toxic properties that made it a major suspect for
the recent autism epidemic. There were no biological
studies presented that did not show major toxic effects
of thimerosal. Thus, it is pertinent to question why the
CDC committee suggested no further research and
emphasize the importance of carefully paying attention
to published and unpublished data and note pertinent
conflicts of interest.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Another recent study performed by Madsen et al.
[74] reported Danish autism rates of 6 per 10,000
for children born in the 1990s. These Danish rates
are very low in the 1990s compared to the U.S. [12].
Madsen et al. [69] report also inpatient rates for the
pre-1993 “psychosis proto-infantilis” at well below 1
per 10,000. This low rate would contradict the single
published survey of autism rates from Denmark,
which indicated an autism rate of over 4 per 10,000
as far back as the 1950s [75].
Additional confounders were present in the U.S.
with high prevalence of autism that were not present
in Denmark: Between 1970—92, the only childhood
vaccine given in Denmark until 5 months of age
was the monovalent pertussis vaccine. In the United
States, children were exposed to multiple doses of
diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, hepatitis B and
haemophilus influenza B (Hib) vaccines before five
months of age in the 1990s. Additionally, Denmark
did not administer thimerosal-containing Rho-D
immunoglobulin during pregnancy, which may
increase the risk for the development of autism [17].
The vaccine schedule for children
aged 5 and under has nearly tripled in 25 years. In 1983,
the Centers for Disease Control recommended 10
vaccines for this age group. Today, the
recommendation is 36 vaccines.
The United States mandates the most vaccines
in the Western world, double the average of the 30
countries studied. All countries with lower vaccine
mandates have better under 5 mortality rates and many
have materially lower autism rates.
United States 1 in 150, Iceland 11 vaccines, autism rate 1 in 1,100, Sweden 11 vaccines autism rate 1 in 862, Israel 11 vaccines, autism rate 1 in 1,000
AUTISM PREVALENCE in the United States has soared. In 1970, Treffert et. al. published the first known autism prevalence study in the United States, Epidemiology of Infantile Autism, with an autism prevalence rate of less than 1 per 10,000. In 1987, Burd et. al. published a study, A prevalence study of pervasive developmental disorders in North Dakota, showing an autism rate of 3.3 per 10,000. In 2007, the Centers for Disease Control’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network released data showing that prevalence of autism had grown to 66 per 10,000 or 1 in 150, an increase of more than 6,000% from the 1970 study.
This study appears to lend credibility to the theory that the U.S. vaccine schedule is linked to the U.S. epidemic of autism, particularly when compared to the published autism rates of other countries. Urgent additional study is required.
The United States has a higher infant mortality rate than any of the other 27 wealthy countries, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control. A baby born in the U.S. is nearly three times as likely to die during her first year of life as one born in Finland or Japan. That same American baby is about twice as likely to die in her first year as a Spanish or Korean one.
Despite healthcare spending levels that are significantly higher than any other country in the world, a baby born in the U.S. is less likely to see his first birthday than one born in Hungary, Poland or Slovakia. Or in Belarus. Or in Cuba, for that matter.
Why is all this so controversial? Almost every class of drug from statins, to Vioxx, to ADHD medications is either way overprescribed or dangerous and ineffective. And any effort to dispute this gets the PR and private investigator treatment, such as is described in ”Bad Pharma.”
Also, Wakefield was hounded out of office, primarily by representatives of the manufacturers. His results have been confirmed here…a team from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina are examining 275 children with regressive autism and bowel disease – and of the 82 tested so far, 70 prove positive for the measles virus … the team’s leader, Dr Stephen Walker, said: ‘Of the handful of results we have in so far, all are vaccine strain and none are wild measles.
This research proves that in the gastrointestinal tract of a number of children who have been diagnosed with regressive autism, there is evidence of measles virus. What it means is that the study done earlier by Dr Wakefield and published in 1998 is correct.
That study didn’t draw any conclusions about specifically what it means to find measles virus in the gut, but the implication is it may be coming from the MMR vaccine. If that’s the case, and this live virus is residing in the gastrointestinal tract of some children, and then they have GI inflammation and other problems, it may be related to the MMR.”
MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) from the CDC and accessing the search engine for VAERS (Vaccine complication reporting site) at http://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/index.php.
1. Since 2005 (and even before that), there have been no deaths in the U.S. from measles, but there have been 86 deaths from MMR vaccine — 68 of them in children under 3 years old. And there were nearly 2,000 disabled.
2. In countries which use BCG vaccinations against tuberculosis, the incidence of Type I diabetes in children under 14 is nearly double. (“Infectious Disease in Clinical Practice” no. 6 pages 449-454, 1997)
3. As reported in Lancet in 1995, inflammatory bowel disease (i.e. Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis) is 13 times more prevalent in persons vaccinated for measles.
4. In a nested case-control study within the General Practice Research Database (GPRD) in the United Kingdom, patients who had a first MS (Multiple Sclerosis) diagnosis recorded were compared with controls. The authors concluded that immunization with the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine is associated with a threefold increased risk of developing MS (Hernan et al., 2004). No increased risk of MS was associated with other vaccines, which included tetanus and influenza vaccinations.
5. In 1982 William Torch, a prolific researcher and publisher on Neurologic topics, presented a paper (later published) at the American Academy of Neurology reviewing SIDS deaths. He reported that in 100 consecutive cases, 70 percent of SIDS deaths occurred within three weeks of pertussis vaccination. In very convincing confirmation, a Japanese prefecture stopped vaccinating after associating SIDS with the pertussis vaccine. It is worth reading the entire description from Viera Scheibner, PhD:
In 1975, about 37 Crib Sudden Deaths were linked to vaccination in Japan. Doctors in one prefecture boycotted vaccinations, and refused to vaccinate. The Japanese government paid attention and stopped vaccinating children below the age of 2 years. When immunization was delayed until a child was 24 months of age, Sudden Infant Death cases and claims for vaccine related deaths disappeared. Japan zoomed from a high 17th place in infant mortality rate to the lowest infant mortality rate in the world when they stopped vaccinating. Japan didn’t vaccinate any children below the age of 2 years between 1975 and 1988, for 13 years. But then in 1988, Japanese parents were given the choice to start vaccinating anywhere between 3 months and 48 months. The Ministry study group studied 2,720 SIDS cases occurring between 1980 and 1992 and they established that their very low SIDS rate quadrupled.
6. A mail survey was done of 635 children in the Netherlands in 2004. German measles and whooping cough (pertussis) were twice as common in unvaccinated children. However, throat inflammations, ear infections, rheumatologic complaints, seizures and febrile convulsions were much more common in the vaccinated group. Aggressive behavioral episodes were eight times more frequent in vaccinated children, and sleep disordered more often. Tonsils were removed in 33 percent of children who had been vaccinated vs. 7.3 percent unvaccinated.
7. In 1947, the first reports of brain inflammation and chronic brain damage, including death, after pertussis vaccination began to be published (Brody, 1947; Byers and Moll, 1948, Low, 1955, Berg, 1958; Strom, 1960, 1967; Dick, 1967, 1974; Kuhlenkampff, 1974; Stewart, 1977, 1979). But it took more than 40 years of collective evidence before academic medicine decided it was true —1981 National Childhood Encephalopathy Study (NCES) and in 1991 and 1994 by the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences.
In 1991, after reviewing vaccine safety, the Institute of Medicine admitted, “In the course of its review, the committee encountered many gaps and limitations in knowledge bearing directly or indirectly on the safety of vaccines. These include inadequate understanding of the biologic mechanisms underlying adverse events following natural infection or immunization, insufficient or inconsistent information from case reports and case series, inadequate size or length of followup of many population based epidemiologic studies [and] few experimental studies published in relation to the number of epidemiologic studies published.”
All we are asking for is that vaccines are more like the Israeli schedule, and no MMR…you can put whatever chemicals you want into your kids arm. i choose to observe the real evidence and make a better choice for my kids.